¶ Intro / Opening
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Get the smarter home system that just gets you at Vivint.com. I'm Ragnar O'Connor. You're about to listen to the history podcast, The Magnificent O'Connors.
¶ The Secret Recording and Redacted Name
And this episode contains strong language. Sometime in February 1995. Nemini Lethbridge, my mum. decided to bug her own house. She called in the services of a private investigator who set up a hidden microphone and recording device. I should stress, Mum wasn't bugging me and Milo. We were in on it. There was someone coming to visit us at Lystia Park and mum had turned to Spycraft to make sure that everything that was said when they got here would be accurately recorded and transcribed.
We've lost the original tape somewhere down the years, but we did find a copy of the transcript. We've brought in a couple of actors to read from it so that you can learn exactly how that meeting went down. So... And I know this is weird. The next voice you're going to hear is an actor playing the role of my mum, reading verbatim from what she said on that day.
Come on, dogs. Dogs, come on. Dogs, come on. In the kitchen. Come on, Costa. It was on the 21st of February, 1995, at 7.40pm, to be precise, that we hit record. Come in. Come through the kitchen so they don't alarm you too much. I'm John. I know you're John, yes. Right, sorry, I should have... What can I offer you? Beg pardon? Would you like a whiskey?
Um, I am partial to a little drop of whiskey. Yes. I'll accept this might seem a little weird. A barrister offering a man called John a whiskey whilst bugging the entire exchange. But we had good reason. The events that led John to our door began two years earlier in 1993. It starts with this. Jimmy's campaigning had caught the attention of the BBC's Newsnight. By this time, his focus was on trying to get documents related to his case released. He couldn't understand why, all these years on...
the government would still withhold them from him. As ever, he maintained he had nothing to do with the murder of Don Cambridge. He wasn't even there. Dad was sure the key to proving this was hidden somewhere within that paperwork. Why is it important to you and your family that you should have these papers? To prove that my wife didn't marry a murderer.
By the way, when Jimmy says his wife, he means mnemony. Although they were legally divorced, they came to consider themselves still married. And you're convinced that the papers will prove that? I'm convinced, yes. Anyway, this TV report goes out in January 1993, and then, about a year later, the authorities finally release some previously withheld files. In that time...
Dad's health has taken a big dip. So it's Milo who goes to take a look at them. I was about 21. I didn't have a clue what I was looking at. And a lot of it was either A... Not allowed in public domain, so that was withheld. Or B, lots of it were redacted. Although there were still loads of stuff the Home Office kept back, Milo was shown 12 thick files covering the years 1941. and 1942. Plenty to go through. In amongst the records one thing in particular stuck out.
A document that made reference to another person the police suspected was strongly connected to the death of Don Cambridge. No name, though. That was redacted. Literally blacked out. But even behind the black ink... We could get a sense of how many letters were in the name. I remember we counted. 14 or 15, maybe? It was tantalising, frustrating, but nothing more than that. Then...
¶ John Andrews' Revelation and Plea
Not long after, this happens. We got a strange phone call in the house one day from a guy who said his name was John Andrews. And John Andrews said, I've got a terrible weight of conscience on me and I want to put something right that's been wrong for a long time. When I was growing up, every time your dad was on TV or your dad's case was in the papers...
my dad would grab my shoulder and say, I should have swung for that. And then he just comes out and says it to us. I think my dad committed the murder that your dad was convicted of. John's dad... is Freddie Andrews. F-R-E-D-D-I-E A-N-D-R-E-W-S 14 letters. For so many reasons, Freddie Andrews seems like the thing that fills out the blanked out space in this story. I'm Ragnar O'Connor. And from the History Podcast and BBC Radio 4, this is The Magnificent O'Connors. Episode 5. Shame the Devil.
In 1941, three names were in the frame for the murder of Don Cambridge. Dad, William Redhead and Freddie Andrews. But unlike Dad or Redhead, Freddie Andrews was never arrested. He never went to court. So to suddenly have his son calling us up out of the blue. It was a revelation. It was an absolute revelation. By this time, Dad had had a stroke. But John kept on coming back and saying, listen, I want to help.
I would love to help. I want to put this right. But getting John to properly sit down and talk to us was difficult. He would disappear for ages and mum would be chasing him up. She would call him and call him and get no reply. So when he did eventually agree to see us at Lystria Park in 1995, it felt like this was our chance to at last clear Dad's name and we had to seize it.
including recording the whole thing. Milo and I were there at that meeting. We were in our mid-twenties by then. I remember them really well. I mean, I remember his grey hair, I remember his weight, I remember his jeans, his brown boots and his leather jacket. Also there was John's daughter, Natalie. She had curly brown hair. She was very quiet and was about the same age as me and Milo.
Sat in the green living room at Lystia Park, it was Mum and John who did pretty much all the talking. If Freddie really did murder Don Cambridge, we needed John to get his dad's confession and get it on record. Although he wanted to help, we were asking a lot of him. I mean, he barely knew us, and we were asking him to get his dad to confess to a murder. Mum knew she had to tread gently.
And of course, while she spoke, the tape recorder kept quietly rolling. I'm going to take you back now to our actors reading from the transcript of that meeting. What you said to me was that your father felt bad in his conscience about Jimmy, having done a life sentence, which he shouldn't have done. You also told me that as a child, your father often said... I should have swung for that. Right, yeah. And we both understand what's meant by this. Right, I do know. Um, it is obvious.
It's something that has ruined Jimmy's life. Right. But to a certain extent, it's also ruined ours, because although we apparently, you know, have a comfortable life...
I couldn't practice my profession for 18 years. I didn't know that. So our lives have been very much shadowed by this. Jimmy's has. Jimmy's has been ruined, and he's now, as you know... paralyzed he's in a nursing home he's had one stroke he's also had a slow bleed he is extremely fragile and he may not last very much longer right um
He'll never come home. Right. But he's still got his brain. He's got all his marbles and the one thing that would make him happy before he died was to get a pardon. But John was concerned. Freddie was now in his 80s. He was also ill in a nursing home. What would be the consequences if he confessed? And then even at that late stage in his life, I feel the possibility of his getting charged is real.
He needed assurances. On the secret recording, Nemini refers to trying to get Freddie a certificate of exemption. Basically, immunity from prosecution. But it was by no means a done deal.
This was stressful, and John was having a really hard time with all of it. I remember him saying to us, my family's saying I'm mad even talking to you. And we were just trying to appeal to his better nature to say, but John... you know this is a wrong and it's it's blacked a lot of lives this story and if you can put it right you'll be doing a very honorable thing a good thing
But if there was any way I could help you, I would. Yes. My dear lady, I would, right? Well, this would help us. This would help us more than I can say. Right. I will go and see my father. I will take the conversation with him, right? Yes. I mean, you're... You're a brave man, John, to do this and I respect you for it. In the end, all you can do is tell the truth and shame the devil, isn't it? The meeting wraps up.
with mum giving them a recommendation of a great Indian they could go to on their way home. We all went outside to see John and Natalie off, and then when they'd definitely gone, we went back into the living room. All said our names for the tape. and gave the time as quarter to nine on the 21st of February 1995. Then I said, so there, and Mum said it too, and then I pressed stop.
We were pretty giddy, to be fair, and we all trusted in John. Here's mum now, back in her own voice. A nice man, and I think he was a truthful man. And he had nothing to gain. But it was all very sad. We got so close and then it really felt appeaseless.
¶ A Series of Tragedies Unfold
It did all fall to pieces. Tragically so. First of all, we don't know if John ever did record Freddie making a confession. But then the Crown Prosecution Service ruled it wouldn't actually grant Freddie immunity anyway. And then something truly, truly awful happened to John Andrews. Yeah. His young daughter Natalie died out of the blue. I remember a really lovely, lovely young woman.
And she was looking forward to her whole life. And looking forward and saying, you know, this is, you know, her life plans. And in a matter of several weeks, she's gone. It was tragic. It was really awful. And it really broke him. He was completely broken by his daughter dying so young. After this, John Andrews tried to keep helping, but eventually he and his family slipped away from us, dragged under, I suppose. by grief and just one day the phone stopped ringing and that was that was that
What happens next, I remember as taking place in pretty short order. Freddie died and Dad suffered a second stroke. We'd been so close to getting what we'd always wanted. but it had all fallen away so quickly. When we first met, he was full of hope. Towards the end of his life, he was dreadfully disappointed. I think he was dreadfully disappointed in me in that I couldn't get him a pardon. But there was nothing that I could do more than any other human being.
He went to war at age 20, gets blown up, then gets sent to death, spends a life sentence, still has a very nice place in Notting Hill. It's not bad. But then ended up in a nursing home because he didn't have a pot to piss in. By 2001, Dad was living in a place called the Little Sisters of the Poor. And he was really scared of poverty as well. It really drove him. He was...
But he didn't know how to anchor himself. I know. But he wouldn't be told. You could not tell him anything. Mum visited Dad most weeks at the Little Sisters of the Poor. taking him out to the pub for a drink. For Jimmy, it was a highlight, something to cling on to as his health deteriorated. He was a dogged old sod. He really was something. he was bulletproof well up until up until the end the end when it came was on the 29th september 2001. as milo and i remember it dad was comatose
for several weeks before he eventually slipped away. But that's not how Mum remembers it. In her memory, Dad was actually conscious, or at least semi-conscious. When Dad was dying... And the three of us were sitting by his bed. He was trying to say something. He was very distressed, wasn't he? I was wondering what he was trying to say. I don't remember none. You don't remember? No, it was very upsetting, but I remember very clearly it was there the whole time.
But he was asking something, but he was... No, I don't. I don't remember him talking for about three weeks before he died, Mum. He went into a sort of real deep coma. I remember it. He was really asleep. He was unconscious. He was not talking. When he suddenly talked to me, he was asking for something.
Get great savings on family favorites at Tom Thumb. This week at Tom Thumb, get medium-ass avocados for the member price of two for a dollar, limit six. Plus, get value packs of signature select bone-in fresh whole chickens, thighs or drumsticks for the member price of...
97 cents per pound with digital coupon. Limit two each. Also this week at Tom Thumb, mix and match selected varieties of Nabisco snack crackers, Ritz, Chips Ahoy, or Nilla Wafers. And get them for $2.47 each when you buy three. Member price. Visit TomThumb.com. In our family, as in any family, Memories swirl around. Most of the time they swirl in the same direction, each of us giving witness to the other's recollections. But sometimes they branch off.
particularly at times of high emotion. When your dad, who you'd love dearly, goes and dies, that's a time of high emotion. To be honest... In those last hours before he slipped away, if he was trying to tell mum what was on his mind, I haven't really given much thought as to what it could have been. But that's only because I think I already know. The one thing in his life he never got straightened. The curtain rises. It is the execution shed of Penderville Prison, 1942.
Everything is geared up towards an execution. But I'm an innocent man sentenced to a hunk.
¶ The Unearthing of Buried Evidence
behaves entirely different to a guilty man. As you can probably tell from the fact we're making this podcast, Dad's death didn't stop us from chasing a pardon. For a while, the case and all the files sat with another solicitor, which of course was a further drain on our family. To be honest, they didn't make much headway. It was a cold case.
And they had other priorities, I think. They sat on the papers. And in the end, I got fed up and took them away. Which is not to say we got nothing out of it. We had a family friend, Ellie, who worked for that solicitor. And in 2022, she went to the National Archives and dug out loads of new paperwork. So much stuff.
She painstakingly photographed it all to add to the file. So when we took the case back, all of those new documents came with the stash. Something else to add to our cavernous archive down in the cellar. Thank God I kept this stuff. There is often a reason for my insistence on keeping stuff. And that's where it all stayed until we started making this podcast.
Us and our production team going through anything and everything we could find. Tapes, photos, documents, the works. But we didn't just revisit the material we already had. One of our producers, Vic, put in a Freedom of Information request, asking for the remaining redacted files in Jimmy's case to be released. We weren't holding our breath. It was a long shot.
We didn't hear anything for months. But then... Today, Vic at the BBC got an email in relation to her Freedom of Information request. On the closed files... that have been closed since the case happened. Here's Milo breaking the news to Mum. Dear Miss Victoria MacArthur, thank you for your inquiry regarding the review. of MEPO 321821. We are pleased to tell you that in consultation with the Metropolitan Police
It has been decided that the extract can now be made available to the public at the National Records Office. Jimmy. We've got it all, Mum. It's open now. Whoa. We've got it, finally. This felt like a big moment. Something Dad had been pushing for right up until his final days. But when we saw the new files, they were a bit of a disappointment. A lot of what had been withheld...
were handwritten copies of documents we'd already seen, or procedural stuff that had been blacked out. It was frustrating that what had been finally released to us amounted to very little of real value. What's become apparent to us over the years is that if there ever was a good reason for the government to hold some of Dad's files back, that reason has become completely lost in the midst of time.
One thing these new documents did give us, though, was that 14-letter name, obscured by black ink. As we suspected, it was Freddie Andrews. Not that having his name confirmed to us took us forward. There wasn't anything new linking him to the crime, only that the police had suspected him, but couldn't pin it on him at the time. So that was a bit of a dead end.
The thing is, when it comes to investigations, sometimes the thing that shakes it all up is something that's been sitting right under your nose or feet from the very beginning. Something had caught the eye of Vic, a document that had been sitting in our cellar for almost three years. It was amongst those papers our friend Ellie had found when she went to the National Archive for us in 2022. Somehow, our family had completely missed it, and I really wish we hadn't.
¶ Jimmy's Damning 1943 Statement
This is your dad. Your dad's making a statement here. Your dad gave a statement in 1943. 1943. Just a year after his conviction. Dad was in Dartmoor Prison then. We know Chief Inspector Thorpe had gone there at that time, apparently to reinvestigate Don Cambridge's death. This statement must have come out of that. Do you want to see if you can read this out loud? I can try.
OK, you ready? So there I am, in Mum's bedroom, reading out this document I've just been handed. A statement of James O'Connor. 20th May 1943 it's typewritten and pretty hard to read I wish to tell you the absolute truth as I know it about the murder of Don Cambridge in April 1941 these words are not familiar to me i'm already thinking where's this going at about 9 30 pm on easter saturday the 12th of april 1941
I was at the Chippingham Hotel with Redhead and Fred Andrews. Jimmy, Redhead and Freddie Andrews. Together on the evening of Donk Ambridge's murder. This was the three who, according to the police, were always in the frame for this crime. I should tell you that we had discussed breaking into Ambridge's place and decided to do it. that night this was to say the least a bit of a curveball completely contrary to anything i'd ever heard my dad say the version we knew was he wasn't there
He had nothing to do with it. I couldn't make sense of what I was reading. But in the moment, I knew I had to keep going. So... I said... I think it would be best to watch him in a boozer and while one of us keeps an eye on him, the other two could screw the place. They knew that Donk was likely to be drinking in one of the pubs near his gaff. I suggested that I should be the one to keep an eye on him.
My plan was agreed to. According to this statement, over the course of the evening, the three men moved from pub to pub, knowing they would bump into Donk sooner or later. We returned to the Chippingham at about 10.30pm. Donk was there, propping up the bar. So, now they had him in their sights, it was time to enact the plan. At 10.45pm, Freddie and Redhead left the pub. At this point, the statement says...
Jimmy decided to hang around outside the Chippenham pub waiting for Donk to emerge so that he could then follow Donk wherever he went. I left the pub at about 10.50pm after waiting in the junction until 11. Closing time, I saw Donk standing on the opposite corner by the coffee store. As the lookout, it was apparently Jimmy's job to keep a line of sight on Donk as he headed towards home. But Jimmy lost him.
At about 11.15pm, I hadn't seen Donk and I thought that it was about time that Andrews and Redhead finished the job. So Jimmy made a beeline for Donk's flat. As he turned the corner, he saw Redhead come out the side door of Donk's place. He was carrying a cardboard box and said to me, I've done it. Why didn't you keep your fucking eyes open? I said, why? What's up? By this time, I was at the street door. Redhead said, come on, let's fuck off. I heard somebody inside the house scream out.
and I ran up the stairs to see what it was all about. In the room at the front, I saw Andrews hit Donk with a tyre lever. Donk was on his knees facing towards the bed, and Andrews was behind him. I shouted out, no, don't do that, and he said a couple more times. The old chap collapsed into a heap on the floor. Dom was unconscious and groaning. The room was lit up by moonlight. It was a beautiful night. We both left the premises, going down the stairs through the front door.
Andrews and I got into the street. Redhead was not there. As they left, Jimmy said they'd better phone the hospital. But Freddie wasn't up for that. Andrews said, he'll be all right. I never hit him hard. The next part of the statement... details how Freddie and Jimmy went to Redhead's house where Freddie and Redhead cleaned themselves out.
After that, Redhead and Jimmy headed to the party that both men talked about in their original statements to the police in 1941. Next, the statement turns to why Jimmy hadn't given this account before. I kidded myself, I was a wide fellow and knowing I had not committed the actual murder thought I could get out of the charge Another reason is that I did not want to shot Andrews. I thought Redhead would do that when he was arrested and so clear me. The statement then finishes off with this.
It is the absolute truth and I'm fully prepared to go all the way in a prosecution of Andrews, the murderer of Don Cambridge. This statement has been read to me and it is true. Signed, Jay O'Connor. Statement taken by Chief Inspector Thorpe, written down, read over and signatures witnessed by Detective Sergeant Griffin, New Scotland Yard.
¶ Confronting a Painful New Truth
I think it's fair to say there were a few shocked faces as we tried to take it all in. A lot of exhalation, but no one said a word. And then mum looked over and said, What do you make of that? None of us knew. I was dumbfounded. I felt like I needed a breather. So Milo and I got some fresh air and then headed back up to mum's room. We were only just starting to process what we'd heard.
Both a bit shocked by that statement, Milo and I. It's not very attractive, but it doesn't surprise me. Jimmy... Had an odd relation with the truth. What he claims there is that he was there. Yes. Which, up until now, we've always thought he was. On the next and final episode of The Magnificent O'Connors, we learn if there's any hope of ever clearing Dad's name. And we have to contend with one final shock revelation from deep within our archive.
I will tell the story of why I'm on the run. You're going to have to decide whether or not you've got the kind of emotional energy to keep going with that fight. You're trying to get a part of the day, aren't you? Right. Is it too late not being funny? Is it too late? The Magnificent O'Connors is a BBC Audio Scotland production. for BBC Radio 4 and The History Podcast. It was produced by Emily Essen and Victoria MacArthur. Listen to the whole series right now, first, on BBC Sounds.
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